I'm so slow on the up take......

[CINDERS]

I found a long forgotten thumb drive the other day and ventured to open it up to see what I had actually stored on it.
Had a bit of stuff from when I was doing safety, auditing the business, an ICAM investigation I conducted for a personal injury to a worker plus the start of itemising my book collection.
Did not get far with the books after 30 odd sourcing web copies for prices, grading, year of print, type and so on as I just became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work!

Anyway along with other stuff was a file that was sent to me by my B/in-law (Now deceased) who was himself a VN vet well the file was my father's WWII papers.
So apart from those that wrote on his records of which it was so hard to make out as they must have taken lessons from Dr's writing scripts just so hard to decipher.
Anyway I did make out 85 Sqdn and OTU but the rest may have been egyptian trying to read it that was until I came to the bottom of one page of his service record.

Here it stated 3 chevrons awarded or something like that but it was the 3 chevrons which caught my eye and my muddy brain started putting 2 + 2 = 5 ?
Years ago after my brother died in 1990 I received some of dad's stuff his medals, RAAF buttons and a few other things along with these 2 pictured items.
Now at the time I thought it odd dad would collect these things but thought they would look good on my book shelf where they have sat for yes I know 34 years !!!!!!!

So I looked at them understanding what they actually are and got pretty emotional about it even though my dad passed away in 1985 it was a sledgehammer blow to me.
So the two items together is physical proof and written proof of my fathers 3 years over seas WWII deployment as he never spoke to me of his war experiences.
The only thing he ever said to me once when I was very young building a model spitfire on the kitchen table as we all did was my father came up to me and said;
"The Merlin aero-engine is the best sounding engine you will ever hear", I agree dad.

So this is for you dad, thank you for what you did and went through.

(I initially thought dad went for 4 years now I know it was only 3 but that is not like some of our boys who are still on patrol 79 years later. RIP)

[jamie5070]

Not slow on the up-take. Life moves on and there were more important things to focus on. My own dad is a Vietnam vet. Has has never talked a lot about the stuff he did. Two years ago I asked him what his rank was. (Permanent E7/temporary O2). He did a lot of stuff while not technically a SEAL. Life moved on, by the time I was old enough to understand, it was 20 years in the past.

[Surpmil]

I got rid about about 25 boxes of books last year - no space my wife said - I thought the aisles were quite adequate myself.

The answer is book-scanners, either proprietary like the Fujitsu SV600, or one of the DIY models. Take a bit of time of course, but do one or two a day and it soon gets done.

There is freeware that will align and crop the scan files etc.

Getting lazy about properly naming files on the computer is another bane of our existence; I finally learned to stop doing that. Have an offline PC with 32GB of RAM and processor to suit and it took hours to index my files the other day, there's about 1.2 million of them and they're not all properly named or sorted. Duplicate files are another PITA.

Get yourself a LaCie one or two TB remote drive Cinders and backup everything in one place, offline. Keep it in the fireproof box if want the added security.

[Salt Flat]

A salute to your father! What a great discovery. I recently discovered that my 2x great grandfather was wounded at the battle of Petersburgh Va. in 1865. The story was never passed down through the family. Through the internet, I have been able to reconstruct the story.

[CINDERS]

Thx for the advice Surpmil I am running 2 HD's on my comp the 2nd one has a terabyte of storage as I am duplicating files I want on that one having suffered a comp crash in 2017 where I lost allot of information.

Thx Salt Flat for your kind words.

[Surpmil]

Thx for the advice Surpmil I am running 2 HD's on my comp the 2nd one has a terabyte of storage as I am duplicating files I want on that one having suffered a comp crash in 2017 where I lost allot of information.

Thx Salt Flat for your kind words.

Your old drive might be recoverable, many are.

It's just not a good idea to have more on our PCs than we need to with all the malware and hijackers etc. around. A USB hub like the Atolla with individual manual on-off switches for each port allows USB sticks or remote drives to be accessible at the press of a button, but kept physically isolated from the PC when not needed and thus protected from snooping or infection and a lot less likely to fail.

Disk drives installed in the PC are running all the time the PC is on; no need for that either: put it in a remote housing and connect when required.

Best to keep nothing on the C drive except programs.

Best to have a dedicated laptop for online banking etc. and don't use it for anything else online. A KVM switch allows two PCs to share the same monitor, keyboard and mouse and switch back and forth at the press of a button. WiFi of course is a complete no-no for anything you want to keep secure.

People who make money "fixing" computers have no interest in telling us how to avoid having to use their services in future.